tpitman

Thank you for the recommendation. Many months ago I actually took that kind of approach. I basically just used the old fashioned bones method. I didn't have the time to do a rig with IK, so I just positioned the bones a key frame at a time and got something that is ok.

It is no where near as good as a real IK control system would give, but it got the job done.

I am keeping this thread alive in the hopes that I might get a solution eventually. I also hope to help SideFX get something that they can market to more game devs like me. auto rig would really help that. There are a ton of new Indie devs who are good coders, but not good asset creators. We are doing this as a hobby with no budget and so can't always hire or buy the assets.

If SideFX can get a tool that works end to end for people like me they open up a whole new market for themselves.

So is there an answer to my problem then? Can I get some guidance on where to go from here?

Along with that here is another reason I am using poly reduce that maybe there is a better solution to:

My model has a texture on it with pants and shirt. When I do a poly reduction on it the texture gets messed up as the polygon count goes down. I would guess that is because the UV map doesn't match the polygons anymore.

What you see is the pants having spikes up into the shirt and the shirt spiking down into the pants as polygons that used to be some pants and some shirt end up spaning across that line.

So what I did was make a sub group that didn't include the polygons between the pants and shirt and applied the poly reduce to the rest of the polygons.

This works well, but if there is a way to solve the root problem of the texture mapping onto the new reduced polygons in the first place that would be better.